Google Forward Deployed Engineer Interview Experience — Agentic System Design and a Coding Round That Turned Into 2D DP

The Google FDE interview mainly had two rounds.

One round was basically an agentic system design round — just a casual chat with the interviewer about problems in agent system design. Questions included how to scale the agent, how to keep it safe, and what to do about agent infinite loops.

The other round was SDE coding, and this is the one I really want to vent about. At first I felt pretty good about it — the question was something like the meeting room problem, a parking-lot variant, and I solved it in no time.

Then the follow-up turned into: given a bunch of square coordinates in 2D space, find the maximum number of squares overlapping at any single point. This should be solved with 2D DP.

But come on — if you don't grind problems regularly, how are you supposed to come up with this on the spot in an interview? I was going with the approach from the earlier question, and halfway through, the interviewer had me switch my DP approach. In the end I didn't finish either version. I was floored. Is this really how you want to fail someone? I really needed to vent about that.

So, everyone, keep grinding practice problems regularly.

I looked it up afterward — it's LeetCode 2536.